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When exactly did lowly tubers become so
hip?” one of my slightly startled uptown guests wanted to know as we
examined the “Soil” section of the menu at the buzzing, indisputably hip
new downtown brasserie Acme,
which opened a month or so ago in the old Acme Bar & Grill space on
Great Jones Street. On this evening, there were vividly colored
salt-baked beets in the “Soil” section, and knobby black-skin heirloom
carrots cooked with pine and garnished with lardo and sprigs of
rosemary. Most eye-catching of all, however, were the great, plum-size
sunchokes, which looked like they’d been unearthed from some rocky
organic garden just hours before. The sunchokes were wreathed in a
creamy foam laced with winter truffles and Gruyère cheese, and brought
to the table by waiters dressed in hip-hugging jeans and skinny black
ties. The vegetables had a delicate char on their exterior, like roasted
marshmallows, and when I asked one of the skinny-tied waiters why, he
said it was because they’d been delicately smoked over little pyres of
hay.

Two of the four owners of Acme have been running downtown-scene restaurants for two decades (most notably ­Indochine and BondSt)
and are adept at imbuing even the most earthy dining trend with a sense
of glitter and hype. There’s a giant thatch of cherry blossoms propped
at the entrance of this chic ­hunter-gatherer lounge, and the bar is set
off by a long mirror-backed wall of glimmering liquor bottles that
would make Keith McNally proud. The weathered roadhouse tabletops of the
old Acme Bar & Grill have been replaced with elegantly worn
Parisian-style café tables, and the old divvied-up bar and dining-room
space has been hollowed out into a single large hall. Like the waiters,
the ­mixologists at the bar are dressed like members of an eighties-era
rock band, and the room is outfitted with tastefully ­curated downtown
art (prints of Playboy bunny–inspired skulls by Richard Prince and a
neon sculpture by Hanna Liden) and rimmed with moon-shaped banquettes
studded with black leather.

The real star at Acme, however, is the Danish chef, Mads
Refslund, who comes to Manhattan from Copenhagen, where he helped
pioneer the delicate, reductive art of forager cuisine with René
­Redzepi, at the world-famous restaurant Noma.*
Redzepi, as anyone who has picked up a glossy food magazine recently
will tell you, is a master at creating seasonal culinary bouquets from
local Nordic ingredients (mollusks, herbs, tubers). ­Refslund’s cooking
is a pared-down, poor man’s version of his collaborator’s high locavore
style. There is no burger at this brasserie. In its place are bubbly
soups whipped from nourishing, wintry ingredients like barley,
chestnuts, and celery root. The house oysters are from Long Island, and
they’re served with “winter pickles” instead of a mignonette. The salmon
is house-cured, and if you order the duck, it comes to the table with
an assortment of pickled vegetables in a jar.

Some of Refslund’s seasonal creations feel stagy and slight
(it’s the middle of winter, after all), but there’s a rigorous,
just-plucked freshness to the best of his cooking that separates Acme
from the fashionably rustic restaurants that keep popping up,
relentlessly, around town. The Duck in a Jar appetizer was almost too
soft and funky for my taste, and a dish called Farmer’s Eggs turned out
to be an awkward assemblage of eggshells filled with cauliflower foam
and arranged on chicken wire. But there was nothing awkward about my
Pearl Barley and Clams stew, which was held together by a rich broth
conjured from butter, beer, and toasted sunflower seeds. A bowl of
frothy, crunchy celery-root-and-chestnut soup from the “Cooked” section
of the menu got similar reviews from my dining companions and me, and
once we got over their scorched appearance, so did the soft and sweet
hay-smoked sunchokes.

The spare entrée list at Acme features the usual tired
assortment of brasserie standbys (steak, chicken, lobster), done in a
variety of unrelentingly seasonal, often inventive ways. My well-cooked
pork chop was buried in pleasing drifts of parsnips and sliced pear, and
a dish called Chicken & Eggs turned out to be a satisfying New Age
version of pot au feu simmered with fried egg yolks and fried fingerling
potatoes in an earthen crock. I didn’t like the lobster (fussily
de-shelled and with bland “seasonal” mushrooms), or the turbot, which
was nicely poached but obscured in too much raw fennel. But the black
sea bass, that old New York locavore favorite, was crisped in delicate
little fillets and brightened with cardamom and sweet green tomatoes,
and Refslund’s delicious version of arctic char (served over a mass of
buttery winter leeks mingled with capers and sherry vinegar) is itself
worth the price of admission.

Acme is already being gang-rushed by hordes of fashionable,
newly converted downtown locavores, and if Refslund and his chefs can
hold up under the pressure, their cooking should only improve when the
more bountiful spring and summer months roll around. In the meantime,
those of you who don’t have a taste for boutique root vegetables can
take comfort in the deceptively inventive house desserts. These include
puffy Danish doughnuts scattered with powdered sugar, an ingenious dish
called Fallen Fruits (dried pears set over a bed of ice and a biting
wheatgrass granita), and a bowl of diaphanously thin chocolate crisps
that are stuck, like a plume of feathers, into a rich chocolate ganache.
If you have to choose one, however, make it the inspired
Scandinavian-style beer-and-bread porridge, which combines all of the
elements of the perfect winter dessert (salty sweetness, warm pudding
softness, the faint kick of booze) in one bowl. — Adam Platt